The Great Outdoors; I'll Pass, Thanks.

I am not one for the outdoors. By outdoors I don't mean sitting in the park on a warm spring day reading a book and sipping a frothy-frozen coffee beverage while in the back of my mind plotting my next meal. I mean the Great Outdoors. I do not camp. Well, not that way.

I was lucky enough to find this out early. I had (have) an older brother who loved all that stuff. Being the younger sibling I insisted that I was included on some of these trips to the outdoors only to be bored rigid. I can remember one where we went fishing on the Mill River in our little town. I can remember sitting in the boat with my pole and looking up in wonderment at the underside of the bridge spanning Meadow Street. 36 seconds later I realized that for me fishing was the most boring and pointless thing in the world. There are fish at the market and since this was the Mill River in the 70's any fish that might have survived the level of pollution most likely would be toxic to eat.

Then there was camping. My brother and a his friend went camping and I wanted to go. My parents basically forced them to allow it. They sat in the tent whittling or telling stories or whatever and after about 12 minutes of this I realised I was cold, the ground was lumpy, I was bored and we'd had the better part of 200 years of being a country so that we could sleep indoors on our Sealy Posturepedics and chat with our friends on our touch-tone Trimline phones while enjoying steam heat.

Luckily the campsite was in our backyard, so I could drop this idiocy and go have a sandwich and watch "Rhoda."

So I learned my limits early. I'm not likely to climb Runyon with you when I can be using an elliptical while listening to techno music. I would like to visit Yosemite, but would do so only to stay at the Ahwahnee. If I am on a boat it had better be flying Cunard colors.

Because my idea of roughing it is going someplace where there isn't a Trader Joe's.

Image: Internets